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Meet Dior’s New Man Who Made Kendall Jenner Walk on Water

(Bloomberg) -- At luxury house Fendi, Pietro Beccari made model Kendall Jenner walk on water. His next assignment: to make Christian Dior fly again.

Beccari, chief executive officer of the Italian fur-and-leather purveyor, has been tapped by parent LVMH to take over leadership of Christian Dior Couture in early 2018. Over the past five years, he’s moved Fendi to the forefront of luxury branding, offering customers a full-immersion experience ranging from eye-catching stores and a whimsical e-commerce site to a boutique hotel and one of chef Rainer Becker’s trendy Zuma restaurants in the Roman palazzo that houses its flagship store.

The Fendi chief cemented the brand’s ties to the Italian capital, adding the word Roma to the logo and moving into a new headquarters at the long-abandoned Palazzo della Civilta Italiana, a marble block dating to the Mussolini era. Behind the arched facade, the building houses art exhibitions, fur ateliers and executives suites.

The brand sponsors art exhibits and cultural restoration projects and staged a runway show last year in which American reality-television personality Jenner and other models traversed a plexiglass runway atop the Trevi Fountain -- a Roman landmark that had been renovated under the brand’s sponsorship.

“Beccari has done an amazing job of taking the craft of the house and using it in a very modern way,” Elizabeth von der Goltz, global buying director at online luxury retailer Net-a-Porter, said in an interview. “At Dior there’s something to be done in terms of modernizing their communications -- making it more playful.”

‘New Look’

Beccari’s challenge will be to take Dior, the first luxury asset French billionaire Bernard Arnault acquired on the way to assembling industry leader LVMH, and restore its status as a trend-setter. While the brand’s tight-waisted “New Look” helped revive the French fashion industry after World War II and its clients have run the gamut from Ava Gardner to Melania Trump, it’s become an elder statesman in an industry being revived by designers like Gucci’s Alessandro Michele.

Under Sidney Toledano, who’s moving on from his position as Dior CEO to a supervisory role at other LVMH brands, Dior has been one of the steadiest performers in fashion, growing an average of 12 percent a year since 2000. But the output of chief designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, hired in 2016 as the first woman creative director since Dior’s founding in 1946, has drawn mixed reviews. Menswear collections by Kris Van Assche pass largely unnoticed -- a far cry from the agenda-setting power the brand enjoyed a decade ago when Hedi Slimane’s skinny suits and jeans set the pace for the industry.

Meanwhile, the luxury industry’s changing fast. Gone are the days when growth could be achieved simply by opening another store in China, or even by designing a generation’s must-have handbag or heels. Led by millennials newly attuned to the allure of high fashion, consumers visit stores to envelop themselves in the brand and its provenance -- and then do their buying at home, online.

“Dior needs a rejuvenation,” particularly online, said Marco Pozzi, senior adviser at Milan-based digital marketing consultancy ContactLab. LVMH declined to make Beccari available for an interview.

The Fendi chief, 50, carried out a multipronged revamp after taking over in 2012 following a six-year stint as marketing and communications director at LVMH’s Louis Vuitton. Under his leadership, Fendi doubled down on its identity as a specialist in high-end leather and furs, ditching entry-level logo-printed canvas handbags to focus on $4,000 Peekaboo bags, $12,000 fox-fur coats and intricate, handmade fur ensembles that can cost as much as $1 million.

‘Top Performer’

Fendi hasn’t ignored its retail network, opening new stores in Australia, Japan and the U.S., including boutiques in New York, San Francisco and Dallas. Rather than sitting on shelves against cold marble, handbags are suspended amidst a wall of golden wands. Entry-level shoppers can still get “bag bugs” -- furry charms to personalize their handbags -- for $650 and up.

The website’s holiday gift guide invites shoppers to explore “Fendi Land” -- an animated depiction of a carnival that walks them through the brand’s range. Fendi under Beccari “has become a top performer in terms of how to convey a luxury experience to clients when they purchase online,” Pozzi said.

While those investments have been costly, Fendi’s expanded scale helps to offset the expense, says Rogerio Fujimori, a luxury analyst at RBC Capital Markets in London. LVMH doesn’t break out figures for individual brands, but RBC says Fendi has sales of about $1.1 billion, with a profit margin over 20 percent. Fujimori estimates that Dior’s margin, as gauged by earnings before interest and taxes, is in the low teens.

Beccari should be able to improve profitability at Dior, Fujimori said, “because of the power of the brand, its scale.”